Pending changes is a new protection tool that allows administrators to apply "Pending changes" protection to a page. Under this setting, the page can be edited as normal, but only the most recent accepted version of the page will be visible to readers. This allows administrators to open up the editing of semi-protected pages to all editors, including those who edit anonymously. The technical work follows a request by Jimbo Wales that the Wikimedia Foundation developers keep Pending changes live (see earlier Signpost coverage), and the conclusion of an interim poll on the matter (see early Signpost coverage). Currently, the improved version of the Pending changes interface is in development at its own test wiki; developers are aiming to roll out an improved version of pending changes in November. Changes are based on feedback provided by users participating in the straw polls and discussions; for example, pending changes was the primary topic addressed by Sue Gardner's IRC meeting last week (see Signpost story).
In a separate development, Lanphier also called for collaboration on a list of "roadmap" bugs which the (paid) development team had been discussing. User:MZMcBride highlighted the post facto nature of the request, and asked that in the future the community be more involved in those discussions, rather than being invited to comment on conclusions alone. David Goodman (User:DGG) added that it was "more consultation than was had for some previous changes", before touching on the key tensions in the community about to what extent Pending changes was being developed for the English-language Wikipedia only.
Code review version updated
The internal installation of the "CodeReview" MediaWiki extension has been upgraded. The extension, which aids in the review of proposed changes to the MediaWiki software itself, has had the following changes implemented
(wikitech-l mailing list):
New statistics on code review have been added, specifically a "wall of shame" for fixmes (changes which have been sent back to the developer to fix as soon as possible)
There is now a new 'old' status for revisions, designed for anything that is two or more years old and still unreviewed (for example, those from before CodeReview was implemented).
The broken parser tests results system was removed, in favor of the phpUnderControl software.
Getting the code review software and process working efficiently again is one of the acknowledged priorities of the Wikimedia engineering department.
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
The official "October" WMF Engineering update was published, with the summary having few major changes from the draft published by The Signpost last week. In addition, it includes substantial in-depth detail on those activities.
With the closing of bug #23819, bureaucrats will be able to suppress the redirects created when a user is renamed.
As part of a breaking change to the API, integer inputs will now be validated to make sure they are within a given range (bug #25303, fix still in progress).
Pywikipedia interwiki bots will now respect a greater range of possible indications that a page is a disambiguation page (revision #8613).
The Wikimedia installation of the jQuery Javascript library was upgraded from version 1.3.2 to the newer 1.4.2 (wikitech-l mailing list).
On 10 October (UTC) all Wikimedia wikis experienced a brief outage due to an apparent bug in the software used for balancing the many millions of requests Wikimedia receives between its servers. It was fixed after around 90 minutes (Wikimedia techblog).
"Five-year targets": Noting that the strategy project (Signpost coverage) was "nearing conclusion", the Board adopted the summary targets for the five-year plan. (According to the April meeting minutes, it had been planned to review the full plan at last week's meeting, too. According to the Foundation's August report - see below - a professional writer had been hired to help "distilling the material on the strategy wiki into a high-level document that could easily be shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters", followed by some vetting and refining, in order to present the strategy document at last week's meeting.)
Wikimedia fundraising principles: The Board established four general principles about Wikimedia's fundraising, concerning the maximization of public support, legal frameworks, transparency and donor privacy, and maximizing participation beyond financial contribution. (See also the Foundation's invitation to become involved in the preparation of the upcoming fundraiser, reported below, and last week's Signpost coverage: "German chapter remodeled to meet Foundation requirements")
"Trustee terms and evaluation": After the July meeting had heard recommendations by the Board's Governance Committee - aided by the Omidyar Network - about terms and evaluation of Board members, accompanied by "robust discussion" (see Signpost coverage), the Board now accepted part of the committees recommendations, namely to extend the term of appointed Board members to two years, and asked the committee to develop further detailed recommendations until the end of the year.
"Movement Roles October 2010": In this vote, the Board "approves the direction" of the recently formed "Movement Roles" working group (see earlier Signpost coverage: October 4, September 27, etc.), and "encourages all interested parties, particularly chapters and other stakeholders" to become involved in the process. The vote has been interpreted as a formal approval of the group's draft proposal.
The minutes for the meeting have not yet been published.
Fundraiser update: the 'Beat Jimmy' challenge
The Fundraising team has been measuring reactions to new slogans over the last 10 weeks, in preparation for the 2010–11 fundraising drive starting on 8 November. A page detailing the results of these preliminary banner tests has been set up, indicating that the majority of donations have been generated – as inpreviousyears – by Jimmy Wales' personal appeal.
In response, Head of Reader Relations Philippe Beaudette and the wider Fundraiser team have announced a challenge to editors: find the banner that will beat Jimmy. Beaudette explains:
There's no doubt about it: the appeal from Jimmy Wales is a strong message. We've tested it head-to-head against other banners, and the results are unequivocal - especially when you also compare its performance last year and the year before.
But nobody wants to just put Jimmy up on the sites and leave him up for two months!
Wikimedia also organized a donor survey, inviting 20,000 individuals from the much larger international Donor group, who contributed less than $1000 between 1 November 2009 and 30 June 2010. They were invited to participate in a 29-item survey of about 70 questions, conducted in August 2010, which attracted 3,760 responses. The tech team have also been making progress with two new tools; geotargeting and a simplified, one-step donation process.
Foundation report for August
The Wikimedia Foundation Report for August 2010 has been published. Apart from highlighting several developments that have been already covered in the Signpost, it contains a statistics update:
Collectively, the Wikipedia projects received a total of 373 million unique global visitors during August, marking a 3.7% monthly increase and 21.4% increase over the past year. Page requests reached 13.4 billion, a drop of 1% from the previous month but still a 23.9% increase on the previous year. One hypothesis for the unusually large drop – greater than the expected seasonal drop in traffic during the northern summer – is that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa may have been responsible for drawing attention from Wikipedia. Starting from August, traffic levels are returning to expected levels. The monthly report card for August is available here.
Visitors to the Foundation in August included James Gosling (known as the father of the Java programming language) and historian Timothy Garton Ash.
The number of good articles surpassed 10,000 this week.
Ten thousand good articles
In a major milestone, the English Wikipedia reached 10,000 good articles this week. Good articles are required to be well written, well researched, complete, accurate, as well as following Wikipedia guidelines. Although they are not as "well written" as Featured articles, they are nonetheless an important standard.
According to GimmeBot, the 10,000th good article is Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union), an important governmental office of the former Soviet Union. Editors are sharing their congratulations on the talk page. As of 9 October, about 1 in 343 articles is a Good article, and 1 in 230 is a good or featured article or featured list. According to GA reviewer Geometry guy:
Although good articles still represent less than one percent of the encyclopedia, it is an amazing achievement to bring the number of GAs to this level while also maintaining scrutiny of quality for individual articles. (Please keep contributing to WP:GAR to ensure that weak GAs are improved or delisted.)
Briefly
The Wikimedia Italia "introduction to Commons" video. Note: captions only display on Commons.
Introduction to Commons videos: Wikimedia Italia has released, on Commons and YouTube, a video introducing users to Wikimedia Commons. The video has English subtitles, and explains how to upload pictures to Commons. It covers project goals, sourcing, the upload page, how to register, the copyright process, OTRS, discussion and the help desk, featured image processes, and donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
IRC Office hours: The log for the 5 October IRC office hour with Zack Exley, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Community Officer, has been posted. Issues covered included the meaning of his job title, page-editing statistics published by Erik Zachte that reveal a disparity between Global North and Global South (see earlier Signpost coverage), the 2010 fundraiser campaign, Exley's social background and standing, the internal organization of the Wikimedia Foundation, and where local chapters fall on the hierarchy.
Wikipedia and trust: Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has posted an entry on her personal blog titled "People trust Wikipedia because we tell them not to". Inspired by a joint talk of Timothy Garton Ash and Tobias Wolff, she discusses how the various cleanup tags are used to indicate required improvements on Wikipedia pages, saying that "people know they can trust it not to be aiming to manipulate them – to sell them something, either a product or a position. Wikipedia is just aiming to tell people the truth, and it’s refreshingly honest about its own limitations."
Research consultant hired: Diederik van Liere has been hired by the Foundation as a research consultant. He will work on research involving user trends and change patrolling tools.[1]
Wiki Loves Monuments: The Wiki Loves Monuments image contest by Wikimedia Nederland has received 12,227 pictures on the Commons and 274 on Flickr, by 235 participants [2]. As part of the project, 7,854 objects were covered; Wikimedia Nederland now has images for about 20,000 rijksmonuments, a third of the total number of 60,000.
On-wiki marriage proposal: Dutch Wikipedia contributor Cumulus this week proposed to fellow Wikipedian Rododendron on her talk page, with a photo of a homemade sockpuppet. Fifteen tense hours later, Rododendron replied...
This case concerns accusations of wiki-hounding and disruptive editing. Stevertigoalleges that several editors deem his editing to be "disruptive" or "in need of banning" because they "still hold the grudge that previous cases did not find in their favor regarding [Stevertigo]". He also alleges that he "largely won" an argument against two editors in relation to the Time article, and that those two editors began editing the Punishment article due to an undue interest in Stevertigo's editing rather than due to an interest in the article. The case is currently in the evidence and workshop phase; participants have started making submissions in both phases.
Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start of the arbitration. However, the handling of the case has been the subject of criticism; for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for an extended period, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see earlier Signpost coverage). More criticisms were expressed recently (examples: [3][4]) but as reported last week, a workshop will be held where users may provide feedback. The proposed decision, drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse, sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion, much of it comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrators, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion continued to increase significantly in the weeks that have followed leading to arbitrators closing or archiving discussions more frequently. Rlevse had said that arbitrators were trying to complete the proposed decision before September 6, but it was later made clear that he will no longer be voting on this decision.
Concerns and questions have been raised about the proposed findings of fact which relate to sockpuppetry in the CC topic area. At the centre of controversy is the proposal alleging that:
...a significant proportion of accounts (20-40% by current checkuser estimates) blocked as Scibaby [a now banned-editor, were] subsequently determined to be unrelated....
This week, participants pointedout that the AUSC report (which the figure is based on) only dealt with range-blocks by one individual (a former arbitrator, who in particular circumstances in 2009, resigned his access to CheckUser and Oversight tools). In response to the concerns about the accuracy of the proposal, arbitrator Corenemphasised that the figure is an estimate, while arbitrator Carcharothstated that he is still satisfied that there is an overreaction to the banned user. However, other participants have considered the approach as unconstructive, expressing concerns about the use of seemingly “outdated figures, which are confusingly billed as "current" checkuser estimates” and the making of statements which may unfairly malign “the people who are presently working on handling the sock puppetry”. Another participant also noted that other parts of the finding may need to be “reworded” due to the circumstances. All eight arbitrators who are voting on this decision continue to support the proposal as worded; arbitrators Newyorkbrad and Carcharoth stated that they are open to further explaining or simply dropping the figure, but no changes have been made at the time of writing.
Update: Earlier today, the proposal was reworded. The proposal now states that
...a significant proportion of Scibaby-related blocks (including range blocks), particularly before late 2009, were subsequently determined to be excessive or incorrect....
